backing up my computers

Sounds dry, doesn't it. Yep. It is dry. Boring. But a necessary fact of life. Especially if your family photos and memories are stored on the computer. Can you believe I have been using computers this past decade and *today* is the first day I have ever created a backup of my computer? I'm not proud of that. But I *am* proud of myself now, because this process has taken some effort.

First the shopping. No, scratch that. First the discussions with DH. Starting months ago. No, please don't buy a portable hard drive, I have a leftover one at the office. Weeks later, one appeared on the desk. Months go by. Strange hardware and cables sitting on the desk. Guilt. Finally I tried it and the computer did not recognize the hard drive at all. Went to the website and it seems that they stopped making software updates for it in 2004, and it won't talk to XP at all. So as far as my computer is concerned, it doesn't exist. And it never will. Oh, and the sticker on the hard drive states it was manufactured in the year 2000.

Now for the shopping. I had a feeling DH would argue about the price. So I decided to find the best deal I could find, then keep the receipt and return it if he found one for less. Good plan. I got a WD Essentials brand portable hard drive with 320MB for $117 plus tax at Fry's. Then I left it sitting on the desk for another few weeks to give him a chance to shop around. He later said it was a fine deal and go ahead with it. Then I nosed around the internet reading comments people posted about the hard drive and saw that they mostly liked the product, but not the company's software. Hmmm. Sounds scary to someone like me who has never done this before.

Now in the accessories program area there was a backup wizard as part of Windows. I went through this and the got things going, only to have the process halt after about 45 minutes. I got an error message saying that the portable hard drive was formatted with FAT32, and won't accept files over 4MB. Problem is, I want to back up the entire contents of my computer, to the tune of 150MB. I referred to the WD website for information. There they told me how to reformat the hard drive through Windows. Then it got really scary. In big letters it warned, MAKE SURE YOU ARE INDICATING THE PORTABLE HARD DRIVE WHEN YOU REFORMAT, OR YOU COULD WIPE OUT THE CONTENTS OF YOUR ENTIRE COMPUTER. Eeeeek! I followed the steps, doing all sorts of scary things like right-clicking on the my computer icon and doing things I never wanted to know about. Luckily, it all worked and I reformatted the hard drive into two halves, and they now have different names. One is the G:\ and one is the H:\ drive. Now ain't that nifty?

And now I see why folks tend to do this overnight. My backup is due to be over at 3am. After a total of 9 hours.